Give the Devil His Due, and God, Too.
Up Against 'God Talk': John McClure on "Actually Existing Religiosity"
John McClure** and I have been arguing about God, the Bible, and religiosity for almost 30 years now. Our disagreements crystallized one day in 1996 at Doll’s, a funky bar adjacent to the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, where I hung out with the English department crowd after hours. We got pretty heated that day, and we still get pretty excited when we take up these topics. Here John defends belief in God in and on its own terms, in Pauline fashion, as “the conviction of things unseen” (Hebrews 11), rather than as an explicable adjunct of reason’s cunning progress. In this he reminds me of the clear-eyed critics of communism—for example, Wladzimiercz Brus, Radoslav Selucky, Istvan Friss), the masterminds of the Prague Spring—who acknowledged the deeply disturbing implications of Soviet doctrine but also recognized the deeply valuable elements of “actually existing socialism.” Not that organized religion (“the church”) has corrupted the correct interpretation of the Gospel, or that the USSR had betrayed the original Bolshevik vision. It’s not a matter of “taking the good with the bad.” Instead John argues that the good is a dimension of tthe bad, and vice versa, and that neither can be understood or appreciated absent the other.
This is a revised version of the original piece.
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The noble goal of “God Talk” is to establish the grounds for a more civil and respectful dialogue between religious believers and spiritual seekers on the one hand and secular, rational progressives on the other. But in making this effort I think it falls—despite its efforts at avoidance--into a common trap, that of over-emphasizing the rationality of religion in order to make it more palatable to non-believers. I say a trap both because I think that any authentic argument for greater respect must be grounded in the fullest possible acknowledgement of how deeply the two great discourses differ, and because I fear that trying to bring them closer in this way often diminishes religion by occluding its most powerful contributions to human well-being.
“God Talk”’s first argument for respect, advanced by A.A.’s Bill Wilson, avoids both these traps not by insisting on religion’s rationality but by questioning reason’s imperial ambitions, proclaiming, as Jim puts it, that “if you make a careful, empirical study of your faith, you will eventually understand that your reason has equally unreasonable origins’” This makes sense, and may well weaken some secular rationalists’ resistance to taking religion seriously. But it hardly exhausts the rational grounds for rejecting religion.
Secularists recoil from religion not just because they believe that it is founded in unreason, but also because they see it mounting unreasonable resistance in the here and now to urgently needed, scientifically mandated collective action: vaccination and masking come to mind, and climate change mitigation. And, of course, because they see it sponsoring social movements characterized by fierce intolerance of difference, obdurate resistance to change, and the violent persecution of those who claim rights unsanctioned in their sacred texts. These grounds for disrespect retain their power even when another ground, reason’s claim to be built on rationally valid assumptions, is disproven. Try substituting “fascism” for “religion” in the formula, “One should respect religion as much as rationalism because both have unreasonable origins,” and see if you feel any more respect for fascism.
I am also unpersuaded by “God Talk”’s second argument the respectability of religion, which proceeds not by diminishing reason’s claim to be thoroughly rational, but by emphasizing the rationality of religion. By drawing out his student’s definitions of the Divinity before introducing them to the history of America’s “Great Awakening,” Jim hopes to prevent them from immediately writing off the movement’s unruly enthusiasts . And I imagine that the strategy succeeds, but at some cost. I’m reminded, in fact, of the infamous Vietnam era declaration that “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” For while the students’ representation of God as an advocate of “equality . . . liberty . . . morality . . .a preferential option for the poor . . . love . . . and revolution” is offered as saving religion, it only does so by stripping it of much that is deeply troubling and (potentially) deeply valuable in actually existing religiosity. More specifically, it overlooks or misrepresents aspects of God’s character that are emphasized in the sacred texts it cites and are affirmed by vast number of contemporary believers.
William James described this multitude as devotees of “the crasser supernaturalism.” Their supernaturalism, James wrote, “admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world's details.” Instead of heaping philosophical scorn on them, he dared to declare himself a member of their party and sought to win it respect. Religion’s A.A. defenders declare for the crasser supernaturalism as well, however faintly, with their talk of a higher power to whom it is profoundly healthful to surrender. But the God deemed respectworthy in the second part of “God Talk” has been stripped of all “crasser” elements in the effort to win secular respect for religion.
As I read it, that is, Jim answers his question “Is it rational to believe in God?” with several versions of “yes.” Yes because God stands for everything that you (an enlightened secular reader) already hold dear. Yes because the God who is implicit in the three “religions of the book,” advocates the values you cherish. And yes because the God who is always a human artifice and whom now we make up out of specific episodes, sayings, and hints from the Bible explicitly advocates these very values.
But this God, fabricated in the classroom, cannot rescue religion from secular disrespect because the God it depicts is not the God of those “crasser
supernaturalists” who constitute the vast majority of religious believers. Not the God, certainly, of those Christians who take the whole Bible as gospel truth. Because the supernatural God represented in that text is much stranger than the classroom God and no steady advocate of his values.
In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, for example, this God is among other things a tribal war deity who frees his chosen people from servitude so that they can secure the homeland he has promised them by means of a series of ghastly doom wars—wars of annihilation—against that land’s inhabitants. And the God of the New Testament is the protagonist of a “one last chance” narrative (“Turn and obey me, your lord, or face destruction.”) which ends, in the apocalyptic chapters of the Gospels and the Book of Revelation, with the slaughter not just of “those who would destroy the earth” but of everyone who defies his ultimatum.
No wonder Jung found in the Gospel of John--also known as the Gospel of Love--and the book of Revelation, both ascribed to the apostle John, the perfect example of the return of the repressed, the return, that is, of a vengeful, bloodthirsty lord of war. If you try to compose a portrait of an all-loving being, or to imagine yourself in that manner, watch out. Your next book is likely to read like “American Psycho.” To suggest that the God of the Bible is democratic, then, or that he “is love,” is to misrepresent the full text and disrespect those believers who take it seriously in it very problematic entirety.
The secular, rational, and democratic image of God advanced in the second half of “God Talk” diminishes God and religion in another fashion as well, by naturalizing and humanizing him in ways that rob him of powers that are crucial to his appeal. I mean those healing powers that make his love tangible, but in ways that secular rationalists tend to dismiss as mere superstition or magical thinking. Secularism, generally, and the fabricators of Jim’s classroom God specifically, want nothing to do with these powers: the gift given to some of his followers to cure mental and physical illness by prayer, the laying on of hands, direct command, or the exorcism of demons.
Nor do they seem ready to respect or even celebrate God for the profound consolation he offers by sending his angels to help suffering mortals and even Jesus himself when they are in desperate need. Nor do they take seriously, it appears, the consolation of his gift of divine withness at times of peril: “May God be
with you”. Nor his extraordinary gift of eternal life to those who follow Him. Yet these are repeatedly depicted and highly celebrated features of God’s work. To build a picture of God that does not include them may indeed reduce God, as Jim says, to “a man, a mere mortal.” But this could be read as “God Talk”’s most egregious act of disrespect to actually existing religion, and its doomed effort to confine humans within the iron cage of secular reason.
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**John McClure taught literature and writing for more than thirty years at Rutgers. While there, he worked to kindle interest in spirituality and the religious by teaching courses on the Bible as Literature, the vitalist dimensions of American fiction, and the spiritual themes “hiding in plain sight” in contemporary novels, drama, and film. Partial Faiths, his 2007 study of the narratives of Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko Don Delillo, and others, helped initiate the study of the “post-secular” aspect of postmodern culture.
Pursuing his own spiritual promptings, McClure worked with liberation theology movements in the States and Nicaragua, travelled in India and Nepal, and studied yoga and mindfulness mediation. In retirement he divides his time between a small farmstead in the South of Spain and his home in eastern Pennseylvania.
So beautifully and powerfully said. All of it helping me understand why I remain a stranger to the whole subject.